History of "Adventure" for the Atari 2600

Summary

According to Robinett – who graciously assisted me with information from his as-yet unpublished memoirs – he was inspired to make Adventure after getting to try out Colossal Cave Adventure during a visit to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab early in 1978. For the unfamiliar, Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-based game built off of an earlier PDP-10 program written by Willie Crowther, simply called ADVENT or alternately either Colossal Cave or Adventure at the time, that had players exploring a real-world cave system. Crowther was a caver and a rock climber at the time, and looking to provide an activity for his children following his divorce, programmed a rendition of a portion of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky for them to explore. This included a variety of puzzles to solve and fantasy elements, and after Crowther shared it with his Dungeons & Dragons pals they provided some feedback and suggestions. Crowther abandoned the game once it had gotten to a functional state in early 1976, and remembered leaving a copy on his Bolt, Beranek and Newman computer system before leaving on vacation only to return and find it was being played across the nascent internet. It was after this point that Woods came across it through the Stanford medical school, then a graduate student at the university. After getting the source code from Crowther, Woods set about expanding the game starting around March 1977, adding environmental elements and more interactions with objects, as well as an end goal. It was this version that Robinett first encountered and said he was fascinated by. He then resolved to use its basic concept of moving between rooms, gathering objects and using them to get past obstacles as the basis for his next game, which would have a Dungeons & Dragons-inspired setting. A drawing of Robinett’s original prototype that Adventure and Superman both stemmed from. Since the VCS isn’t designed for full text adventure gameplay, Robinett worked on translating Colos...